But the image of the despot with the megaphone has always been a convenient fiction. Film-making is a team sport and great movies are born when all the big players show up on the day. Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here is such a movie.

This instant cult classic features a bearded Joaquin Phoenix as a grizzled hitman tasked with rescuing a senator’s daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) from a New York paedophile ring.

The pulpy plot, which Glasgow-born Ramsay (most famous for We Need to Talk About Kevin) has taken from Jonathan Ames’ short novel, has led to early and perhaps ironic comparisons with Liam Neeson’s Taken.

Both feature ex-military men battling kidnappers, but there are no wonky-shooting goons here. Joe’s brutal weapon of choice is a hammer and his “very particular set of skills” include self asphyxiation and an almost suicidal urge to put himself in danger.

We’re not even entirely sure of his backstory. As Joe gets entangled in a a web of corruption, brief flashbacks take us to a compound in the Middle East, a lorry strewn with corpses and a wardrobe where a boy is suffocating himself with a plastic bag.

In one astonishing sequence he lays on the floor with a felled victim. As the goon’s life ebbs away, they hold hands and sing along to a pop song on the radio.

The scene where our hero storms the paedophiles’ den is just as surprising. As Joe marches through the front door with his hammer, Ramsay switches to CCTV, cutting between cameras as he bludgeons guards.

I know how they felt. This dense, brutal film hammered away at my senses from the start. When it bows out after a fat-free 85minutes you may want to stay in your seat, go over what you saw and wait for the next showing.